For a change, let’s talk about the Quality Factor: why is some embroidery better than other embroidery?

Take a look at the following two pictures:

Spot the differences?

The first one, done by us here at Eel Fen, is how it’s supposed to be.

The second one, done by Sigma Embroidery of Littleport is truly awful.
They considered this one, and numerous others, OK to go out to a customer, though. Unfortunately, the customer was not visually impaired...

Notice that the main blue ellipse has pulled in along the grain of the fill stitches, so that there are gaps at the left- and right-hand sides. Also, the elliptical border stitch is narrower than in the Eel Fen one. At the left-hand side, it has pulled in so much that the white under-thread is visible. Other symptoms are the puckering of the fabric around the logo, and the looping of the white thread at the top-right end of the “C”.

Most of this comes down to one thing: backing. Most fabric is not stable enough on its own to take embroidery, which involves lots of threads being looped through the fabric and pulled tight. The thinner and more stretchy a fabric is, the more this is an issue. So we need to use a backing material of some sort.

The Sigma Embroidery example above used a tear-away backing, which is thin and paper-like. As you can see, this just isn’t up to the job. Here at Eel Fen, we use a heavier cut-away backing, which is a felt-like material. It takes a few seconds longer to remove afterwards, but gives much better results. We use this for front-of-garment logos on polo shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces;
tear-away backing is used only for stable materials such as the outer shells of jackets and (perhaps surprisingly) ‘smart’ shirts. Caps don’t need backing, as the drill material is very stable.

Simple really ...

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